Brett Steinberg is on a mission to change the way the human
brain is studied. In the process, he hopes to help scientists
and lay people better understand both the way the brain works
and the way we age.

Steinberg, an assistant professor of psychology, uses functional
neuro-imaging, known as fMRI, to examine neurological functioning
and age-related changes in the brain. fMRI identifies the regions
of the brain involved in performing specific tasks by detecting
changes in the oxygen level of blood, Steinberg says. In use
for about a decade, fMRIs quickly produce images with good spatial
resolution.

"You can put people through cognitive tasks and see how different
areas of the brain talk to each other," he says.

Researchers have used fMRIs to get a reasonably precise idea
of where language resides, he says. The technique may also have
the potential to aid in the diagnosis of degenerative disorders
such as Alzheimer's disease.

"fMRI could be a useful diagnostic tool," Steinberg says. "It's
a non-invasive way of studying how the brain works."

Steinberg is currently using fMRI to examine face and object
processing. Researchers have been investigating the phenomenon
since the 1970s, but fMRI has proven to offer unique benefits
for studying it, he says.

In a recently completed study, Steinberg and his colleagues
studied complex visual processing in five men between 20 and
30 years old with no history of neurologic or psychiatric illness.
While being scanned in an MRI machine, each man was shown a
drawing in the lower half of his visual field. Each then had
to determine whether the drawing could be found in exactly the
same form in another drawing that appeared in the upper half
of his visual field.

In the control portion of the study, the men had to determine
whether simpler images could be found in both parts of the visual
field.

Analysis of the data revealed robust activity in several parts
of the brain, Steinberg and his colleagues found.

The recent results were compared with results of other studies
that examined patients with brain injuries.

"The diffuseness of this pattern is consistent with the observation
that patients with lesions in diverse brain regions may perform
poorly on tests of figure-ground discrimination," the researchers
wrote.

An abstract of the study, titled "Functional Neuroanatomic Correlates
of Complex Visual Processing: An fMRI Investigation," was published
in the journal NeuroImage earlier this year.

Although this study only involved young men, Steinberg and his
colleagues are currently reviewing follow-up data from older
men between 70 and 85 years of age. Eventually, they hope this
research will make an important contribution in the area of
age-related changes in the brain.

"People do worse on a variety of cognitive tasks as they age,"
says Steinberg. "I hope to find out why."

Steinberg joined UConn's faculty this semester. He was previously
a psychology postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan
Medical Center's Department of Psychiatry. He received his Ph.D.
in 1998 from the University of South Carolina.